College students may be able to save as much as 70 percent off their textbooks through a new rental program from McGraw-Hill Education. Starting this spring, the company is offering rentals on more than 250 of its copyright 2019 titles, plus all future titles, through its e-commerce channel on the company website as well as through approved distributors.

Macmillan Learning is launching a new course materials product that brings together open educational resources, instructor supplements and on-demand support. Dubbed Intellus Open Courses, the materials are curated by the company's subject-matter experts and editorial team and cost just $14.99 per student per course.

Contract cheating, the use of custom writing services to produce coursework, may soon be harder for students to get away with. Turnitin, a provide of plagiarism detection, online grading and peer review tools, is developing new technology to help identify and investigate the practice. Slated to be available in the second half of 2018, Authorship Investigation will use "a combination of machine learning algorithms and forensic linguistic best practices to detect major differences in students' writing style between papers," according to a news announcement.

A university in the Netherlands has adopted wide wall technology that helps teams of collaborators —faculty and students — display and revise their projects in person and remotely. Delft University of Technology has deployed two Nureva Walls, one 10 feet wide and another 20 feet long, along with Nureva's Span software, in a new teaching lab. Both walls provide large digital workspaces where users can share, add and interact with the visuals and information through Span, which runs on their computers and mobile devices.

Shortly, colleges and universities that use the Blackboard Learn or Moodlerooms learning management systems will also be able to offer "day-one access" to digital curriculum for their students, through an agreement between Blackboard and VitalSource. Under the terms, faculty will be able to select content from VitalSource's catalog of digital textbooks and make them available to students on the company's digital textbook platform through their LMS from the first day of class.

Flipping a science course, by having students watch videos first to learn basic concepts and step-by-step procedures for doing lab work, can improve the outcomes. That's the finding of an experiment run at DeSales and Clemson Universities in a research project sponsored by a journal publisher that produces such videos. The project was undertaken by TERC, a nonprofit STEM education research and development organization, on behalf of the Journal of Visualized Experiments.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab North America has launched the Education, Technology and Opportunity Innovation Competition in an effort to identify effective technology use and provide examples of how learning can be improved through innovation. The competition asks school networks, education agencies, nonprofits and post-secondary institutions to evaluate their education programs based on technology, especially those focused on disadvantaged students.

There's never been a better time to seek funding for education technology. According to Metaari, 2017 turned out to generate the most investment dollars ever in the learning technology industry. It topped $9.5 billion globally, up from $7.3 billion in 2016, which was itself 46 percent higher than the $6.5 billion in investments made in 2015. The latest year's funding went to 813 ed tech companies, the highest ever recorded, according to the learning market research company.

The practice of faculty relying on bundled textbooks and, specifically, access-code materials to provide course problem sets, quizzes, tests and case studies, has wreaked havoc with student efforts to find cheaper textbook alternatives. According to a new report from the Student PIRGs, among a sample group of schools, 45 percent of these supplemental resources were unavailable from any source other than the campus bookstore. As the report's authors noted, the use of those bundles, which exist behind paywalls, eliminates the ability of students to "shop around," which means they're "forced to pay full price for these materials." They also can't resell their textbooks because the access codes typically have expiration dates.